OPTION DELTA: ROGUE WARRIOR (Rogue Warrior Series) - Hardcover

Marcinko, Richard; Weisman, John

4

667 ratings by Goodreads

9780671000684: OPTION DELTA: ROGUE WARRIOR (Rogue Warrior Series)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671000683 ISBN 13: 9780671000684

Publisher: Atria, 1999

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

The Rogue Warrior leads a mission into Germany during which he is directed to recover a pair of U.S. Atomic Demolition Munitions lost in the Rhine Valley but encounters additional challenges from the terrorists he encounters there. 85,000 first printing. Tour.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Richard Marcinko retired from the Navy as a full commander after more than thirty years of service. He currently lives in the Alexandria, Virginia area, where he is CEO of SOS Temps Inc., his private security firm whose clients are governments and corporations, and Richard Marcinko Inc., a motivational training and team-building company. He's also designing Crossroads Training and Development Center at Freedom, Indiana. He is the author of The Rogue Warrior's Strategy for Success: A Commando's Principle's of Winning, and the four-month New York Times business bestseller Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior: A Commando's Guide to Success. In addition to his bestselling autobiography, Rogue Warrior, he is co-author with John Weisman of the New York Times bestselling novels Rogue Warrior: Red Cell, Rogue Warrior: Green Team, Rogue Warrior: Task Force Blue, Rogue Warrior: Designation Gold, and Rogue Warrior: Seal Force Alpha.

Chapter 1

God, how I do love being cold and wet. And it is lucky that I do, because cold, and wet (not to mention tired, hungry, and suffering from terminal lack o' pussy), is precisely how I have spent a large portion of my professional life. Take my present situation. (Oh, yes indeed. Please, take my present situation. All of it. Each and every molecule. Every single fucking bit.)

And exactly what was my current situation, you ask? Well, to be precise, I was one of four SEALs crammed inside a spherical steel tank built for two -- we're talking roughly eight feet high by five feet in diameter -- in total blackness, squashed atop and against the three similarly chilly and claustrophobic occupants, and clinging to a ladder attached to the side of the cylinder so I wasn't stepping on the head of the man below me. just to make things interesting, cold seawater from several vents was being pumped into the tank. Currently the water was at crotch level, and it was frigid enough to shrink my Rogue-sized balls to hazelnuts, even through a thick, black neoprene foam wet suit, which covered me head to toe.

I waited quietly, patiently, until the tank was completely filled. As the water came in, I could hear the air as it escaped through the collar of the air bubble hood manifold above me. Under what might be called normal circumstances, I could have monitored our progress on the chamber's interior pressure and air gauges courtesy of the two waterproof battle lanterns that are mounted six feet above the bottom hatch cover. But Mister Murphy (of Murphy's Law fame), or one of his Murphyesque minions, had already decided that light was an unacceptable component of the night's activity, and thus he had caused the lanterns to malfunction as soon as the bottom hatch had been sealed, the pressure equalized, and the water begun to flow.

Even so, I might have followed the action by using my waterproof flashlight. But my waterproof flashlight was safely stowed in my equipment bag. And my equipment bag was being transported on the fucking deck of the fucking nuclear attack submarine on which I was currently a passenger, lashed to a cleat behind the sail, where I would retrieve it after I'd completed lockout.

Under normal circumstances, we wouldn't even have been in this particular fucking sewer pipe, which is how SEALs refer to subs. We'd have been aboard one of the retrofitted SpecOps craft, attack subs that have been specially outfitted for us shoot-and-looters. We'd have had the advantage of Mark-V SDVs, or swimmer delivery vehicles, which are carried on the decks of SpecWar subs in bulbous clamshell devices called DSS, or drydock shelters. But there are only three such boats available, given the current drawdown to our 296-ship, twenty-first-century Navy. And so, we'd had to make do with what was on hand. Which was, to be precise, the USS Nacogdoches (SSN 767), a third-generation Los Angeles-class U-boat, equipped to kill other subs, launch Tomahawk missiles, lay mines, wage electronic warfare, and do many other, sundry top secret tasks. But the list did not include the capacity to accommodate and launch eight SEALs and all their equipment on a clandestine mission.

The result as you can probably guess, meant that we'd had to jury-rig everything from our sleeping quarters (we'd hot-bunked in the forward torpedo room with the Tomahawk missiles, Mark 48 ADCAP -- ADvanced CAPability -- torpedoes, and Mark 67 SLMMs -- Submarine Launched Mobile Mines), to having to store our weapons and other gear outside the sub, as the escape hatches were too narrow to allow us to exit with anything more than our Draeger LAR-V rebreathers. Even our method of egress was nonreg. SSNs have two escape trunks. This one (known formally as the stores hatch, because it was where the ship's stores are commonly onloaded) was the most forward trunk. It was located just aft of the control room and abutted the triple-thick insulated, lead-shielded wall surrounding the nuclear reactor compartment.

SSNs modified for SpecWar have enlarged escape trunks so that SEAL platoons, which number sixteen, can lock out quickly. Unmodified SSN escape trunks are, as I have just pointed out, built for two men at a time. But given the parameters of my current mission, which included the necessity of a quick exit, I'd changed the rules. And so, we were locking out four at a time. Which currently gave the escape tank the crowded ambience of a frat-house telephone booth during a cram-the-pledges contest.

Thus, I stood immobile in the darkness, teeth chomped tight on my Draeger mouthpiece, trying not to stick my size ten triple-Rogue foot in Gator Shepard's size normal face, while trying my best to stay out of range of Boomerang's bony elbow (he has a nasty habit of flailing his arm like a chicken's wing when he's under stress), running and rerunning the night's schedule in my head. Oh, yes, it was much easier problem solving than thinking about my iced-down nuts and my other chillpacked nether parts. And so I stood there in the cold and the wet, anticipating everything that can, could, will, would, shall, should, may, might, or must go wrong, so I'd be able to outwit Command Master Chief Murphy who, experience has shown, likes to tag along on these kinds of ops.

Finally, I sensed the water flow had stopped. When I was positive no air remained in the escape chamber, I flexed my shoulders, worked the cramp out of my neck, and then started to pull myself toward the steel ladder bolted to the escape trunk bulkhead. I knew that I had to climb three rungs, then reach above my head in the total blackness to the spot my mind's eye had muscle-memoried as being the first of the six dogs that secured the trunk's outer hatch cover.

Wham! My action was interrupted by a rude elbow (or other sundry Boomerang body part -- it was dark after all, and who could really tell), which smashed into the right side of my temple. I went face first into the ladder rail and saw goddamn stars. Belay that. I saw the whole Milky fucking Way. Oh shit. Oh fuck. Oh, doom on Dickie. Which, as you probably know, means I was being fuckee-fuckeed in Vietnamese.

My mask came off -- the back strap separating from the clasp and disappearing into the void between my legs. And then the sonofabitch hit me again -- this time smack upside my wide Rogue snout, which knocked my mouthpiece clean out of my mouth. I gagged and snorted, which just about fucking drowned me, because as you will remember I was completely underwater, and gagging and snorting when underwater means inhaling what in SEAL technical language is known as the old double-sierra: a shitload of seawater.

It occurred to me that perhaps I should yell "CUT!" and start this process all over again. But that, of course, was impossible. This wasn't fucking Hollywood, where you get as many takes as you need to Get It Right. Or a goddamn training exercise, where you can take a time-out to regroup, rethink, and reapply yourself to the task at hand. This was for real. And there was a mother-blanking, bleepity-bleeping schedule to keep.

You what? You want to know what that schedule was? And you want me to explain it all now? When I'm in serious fucking pain?

Geezus, have you no sense of timing? Okay, okay -- you paid good money for this book, so I'll be fucking accommodating. To be brief about it, the mission tonight was for me and my seven SEALs to lock out of the Nacogdoches, swim undetected roughly eighteen hundred yards to the northeast, and make our way under half a dozen picket boats manned by armed and dangerous nasties. Then we'd locate die Nadel im Heuhaufen -- in this case it was a certain seventy-five-meter boat -- board it, obliterate any opposition, and then capture a Saudi royal yclept Prince Khaled Bin Abdullah. We would do all of this sans any hullabaloo whatsoever.

The reason for our stealth was that Khaled baby was the forty-seven-year-old scion of the Abdullah family, third cousins of da king, and Saudi Arabia's sixteenth most wealthy clan. Khaled's annual income was somewhere in the $400 million range, which works out to something like thirty-three million U.S. smackers a month. Educated in Germany, England, and France two decades ago, he'd eschewed the lavish single-malt scotch, Cristal champagne, beluga caviar, and hooker-rich lifestyle most of his fellow princes took up. Instead, he'd somehow gotten involved with the campus radicals, e.g., assholes from the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Red Brigades, and others like them. So Khaled wasn't into conspicuous consumption like most of your Saudi blue bloods. Instead, he'd invested his profits from Microsoft, Dell Computer, Cisco, and Intel, his circa 1980 12.5 percent zero coupon bonds, and his ARAMCO oil royalties in transnational terrorism.

Khaled funded Hamas suicide squads, Algerian GIA (Armed Islamic Group) death squads, and Kurdish car bombers. You could say that his money endowed "chairs" in murder and assassination at two of the five "universities" the mullahs have set up outside the Iranian cities of Tehran and Qum to train transnational terrorists. He'd provided financial support and logistics to the Harakat-ul-Ansar's program to assassinate westerners in Kashmir and Pakistan. He'd even given money to American neo-Nazis, German radicals, and Puerto Rican ultranationalists. This scumbag was a real equal-opportunity tango.

And until now, between the reluctant but constant protection of the Saudi royal family (he was, after all, an illegitimate third cousin to the current Saudi ambassador to the United States, which made him a directly indirect relative of da king), and his residence in rural Afghanistan, where he was protected by a brigade of Come-Mister-Taliban-Tally-Me-Banana-clip-on-your-AK-47 gunmen, it hadn't been politically prudent, tactically practical, or diplomatically realistic to lay our hands on him without creating what the State Department tends to describe as "a deplorable, regrettable, and unfortunate violation of sovereign territory involving United States military personnel."

But tonight, his illegitimate ass was going to be mine. Because my guys and I would nail him in international waters, where the State Department has no jurisdiction. Once he'd been properly TTS'd -- which as you know means tagged, tied, and stashed -- we'd turn him over to the proper authorities, i.e., a team of special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who were already waiting on a close-but-not-too-close VSV. They'd ferry him to an aircraft carrier cruising off Malta, where he'd be put on a plane that would, through the marvel of in-flight refueling, not touch down until it reached the good old U.S. of A. Bottom line: he'd stand trial for financing the bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia a few years back and killing nineteen American military personnel.

Yes, friends, when it comes to terrorists, the United States has a long, long memory. And sometimes, despite the current State Department's best efforts to the contrary, we even act on it.

Ninety-six hours ago, Khaled, the TIQ, had been lured out of his safe haven in Afghanistan to these here international waters, which happen to be eighty miles due southwest of Akrotiri, Cyprus, by the promise of securing something he'd been trying to buy for the past decade: a ready-to-go, .025-megaton Soviet special demolition munition device, popularly described as a suitcase atom bomb, (even though the goddam thing does not come in a suitcase). The bomb was real -- and the man selling it to him, a former Stasi officer-turned-black marketeer, smuggler, and arms merchant named Heinz Hochheizer, was a bona fide no-goodnik. Neither Heinz nor Khaled realized they'd both been set up in a protracted, complex, and very intricate sting by the CIA, which thought that getting its hands on one of the old Soviet devices at the same time Khaled was being scooped up made an excellent idea.

It had taken more than nine months to get this far, but Khaled had finally nibbled at the bait, and the folks at Langley had allowed the hook to be set -- hard. Still, Khaled was a smart sumbitch. He knew that Fawaz Yunis, one of the tangos involved in the hijacking of TWA 847 back in 1985, had been seduced into international waters by the lure of pussy. But as we all know now, the PIQ (look it up in the Glossary) had been a female FBI agent, an integral part of the FBI's aptly named Operation Goldenrod (sometimes the Bureau actually does have a sense of humor). And Khaled remembered all too well that Mir Aimal Kasi, the wealthy Pakistani who'd killed two CIA employees and then fled to his homeland, had been sold out by his fellow countrymen -- his bodyguards, actually -- and scooped up in the summer of 1997 by a joint task force of CIA officers, FBI Special Agents, and Delta Force shooters.

And so, Khaled was real careful about leaving his Afghan sanctuary, even with the wonderful prospect of securing an atom bomb staring him in the puss. It had taken three months of negotiation before he'd agreed to meet Heinz in a non-Islamic venue. Only the threat that others were interested in securing the weapon had finally brought him out of hiding. And Khaled had insisted on making all the arrangements for the exchange -- arrangements that changed daily, sometimes even hourly, all posted in encrypted messages on the Internet.

But he was being watched by a joint CIA/FBI team. And so, Khaled's progress was noted as he flew in his private jet from a small airstrip southwest of Meymaneh, to Tehran. He was shadowed as he'd driven through Damascus, to Beirut, where his chopper awaited him for the final leg of the journey. It was in Beirut that Mister Murphy showed up and our intrepid American gumshoes lost him. Khaled climbed into his limo and drove to the airfield where his chopper was waiting to take him on the final leg of this nasty odyssey, a 230-mile flight onto the deck of the transatlantic-capable, seventy-five-meter boat I'll call the Kuz Emeq, which had sailed from Cannes to the anonymous rendezvous point Khaled had chosen in the middle of the Med. But when the big Mercedes limo pulled onto the tarmac, Khaled was nowhere to be seen. He'd pulled a fucking vanishing act that would have done David Copperfield proud.

The team panicked -- and with good reason. This op had cost us a bundle -- not to mention more than a dozen assets. The alarm bells went off, and our people combed the whole goddam Mediterranean from Libya to fucking Marseille. But Khaled had disappeared. And then, after thirty-six hours of nothing, they spotted another of his private choppers, a CH-3C with a range of more than six hundred miles that we'd originally sold to the Saudi Air Force. It was flying south, threading the needle between France and Italy. When it refueled at Cagliari, Sardinia, one of our people got a peek inside. And guess what? Khaled was there, sipping on his Evian water and reading the Koran. Two hours later, he was sitting in the main salon of the Kuz Emeq as it steamed eastward toward the rendezvous point, with us, and the USS Nacogdoches, in hot pursuit.

Khaled had arranged for the bomb vendor, Heinz the East G...

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.